ABSTRACT

With sword, spear, and axe, the Anglo-Saxons effaced a long-established Latin civilization, putting an end to even the language of the native British people. Anglo-Saxons had first come to Britain as mercenaries in the service of Rome, and then in the service of the Romano-British authorities who endeavored, after the withdrawal of the Roman legions, to save their country from destruction. The language and the literature transmitted to America from Britain carried with them certain assumptions about liberty and order, as expressed through law; also certain assumptions about the human condition, "of moral evil and of good". School anthologies in the United States were thickly packed with selections from such British authors of verse and prose—to which were added, as a distinctive American literature developed, the poets and essayists of New England, the Middle States, and the South. Through enduring literature, wisdom—the wisdom of the species, the intellectual bank and capital of homo sapiens—survives the tooth of Time the Devourer.